The Intel Media SDK is cross-platform API that consists ofa set of libraries and
tools to to get fast video playback, encoding and processing to applications. Our
software uses several libraries from the SDK to enable transcoding.

Using the Media SDK, videos and audio can be software transcoded or with hardware
accelaration. Needless to say, the latter speeds up the process considerably. However,
the requirements to use hardware accelaration with the Media SDK are rather specific.
Therefore, we currently only provide documentation on how to use the Media SDK in
software mode.

If you would like to enable hardware accelaration with the Media SDK running on
Windows, please see the Intel Media Server Studio website for a list of prerequisites.
Hardware accelaration on Linux is possible as well, but it not only requires specific
hardware, but also a different installation process than the one detailed below.
Contact us if you are interested in using such a setup with our software.

To start, download the free community edition of the Intel Media Server Studio SDK. Install
it on a 64-bit version of either Windows 8, 10, or Server 2012.

When installing, only the SDK (Software Development Kit) component is necessary.
Please uncheck any other options, like shown below:

When the installer prompts you to reboot, please do so. Once up and running
again you may install the 64-bit Windows version of Unified Capture. If both the
installation of the Media SDK and Capture were succesful, using the --frame_accurate
parameter on your command line will produce frame accurate clips when specifying
the begin and ending times using the t=-parameter. For example:

Below you will find step by step guides for installing the Intel Media SDK on
CentOS and Ubuntu, as well as a simple way to check whether your installation was
successful. The guide for Ubuntu includes the necessary steps to enable hardware
accelerated transcoding, while the guide for CentOS does not. Both guides suppose
a clean Linux installation. The guide for CentOS is specifically targetted at
release 7.2.1511, which Intel defines as the Gold standard for Linux installations
of their Media SDK.

Enabling hardware decoding with the Intel Media SDK on Linux brings along much
more requirements and calls for a different setup procedure. Contact us if you
are interested in using such a setup with our software.

Intel defines release 7.2.1511 of CentOS as their Gold standard for Linux
installations of their Media SDK. Because of this, we recommend using this specific
release, despite that it has been deprecated. The steps below assume a fresh
installation of this release. Also, a minimum of two available
CPU cores is a prerequisite.

If you need to install CentOS version 7.2.1511, it can be found here (please keep
the installation as is and don't run any yum updates after installing it):

http://vault.centos.org/7.2.1511/

Then, the following steps will install only the packages from the Intel Media
SDK that are required for software transcoding. Please note that when installing the
libva-1.67.0.pre1-59511.el7.x86_64.rpm-package, you should include the --nodeps
option, as specified below.

The first step is to add the user that will run Unified Capture to the video
group, so that software that this user runs is allowed to directly address the
GPU. Replace <user> with your user of choice in the example below:

#!/bin/bash
usermod -a -G video <user>

The second step is to install wget. If it is already installed, you can skip
this step.

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wget

The third step is to run the script below, which will:

Download the installation package from Intel

Expand the relevant directories of the package

Remove other libdrm/libva libraries

Remove old installation files from the package

Install the necessary components

Set enviroment variables

Install kernel dependencies

Patch the kernel

You can download the script here: media-sdk-ubuntu.sh. Running it
takes more than an hour, because it patches the kernel. After the script is
finished a reboot is required.

Having installed the necessary packages, you need to install mp4split and
add your license key. The mp4split version that you should install is a specific
version that includes transcoding capabilities that are necessary for frame accurate
capturing. This version is not generally available yet, so please contact us so
that we can provide it to you.

If the installation of the Intel Media SDK and the mp4split version with transcoding
capabilities was succesful, the last command above creates a new clip from one of
the videos that is part of our demo, and will use frame accurate capturing to do
so. This can be checked by looking at the last part of the standard output of the
Unified Capture command, which should like something like this: